E-mail and other electronic messaging systems have enabled a technical revolution in business and personal communications, and have provided a platform for social and organizational networking. In recent years, use of electronic messaging, such as e-mail, short messaging, text messaging, blogging, electronic forums, and so on, has increased exponentially due to the inexpensive and near instantaneous communication platform that electronic messaging provides. Such platforms have rapidly decreased time required to share and disseminate information, whether for a large, multi-national organization, a network of friends or family members, or remotely located small business partners.
The advent of electronic messaging, whether via fixed line communications (e.g., computer and Internet) or mobile communications (e.g., cellular phone), has led to diverse business ventures supporting this technology. Initially, such ventures were limited to large organizations with enough capital to support initial infrastructure investments required for long range electronic communication. For instance, the Internet was initially a defense research project funded with military and university funds. As commercial applications became apparent, private sector ventures leveraged the initial structure to establish public and private links to the initial architecture. The first forms of electronic messaging over the Internet consisted of e-mail; however, the versatile transport control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) enabled other messaging architectures, such as short message service (SMS), text messaging, to couple with the basic communication infrastructure. As the World Wide Web expanded across the Internet infrastructure and hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) and other protocol web pages became a prevalent form of data exchange, message forums, blogging and other forms of Web-based electronic messaging became popular. One of the more sophisticated recent advancements are the social networking sites that inter-link individuals, or nodes, based on inter-personal relationships, or ties. These sites provide a simple and powerful platform to share information, communicate real-time or in delayed-time (e.g., via posting on a forum), and so on.
Although more advanced electronic communication platforms have developed over time, the original e-mail system has survived as one of the most prevalent messaging systems, both in business and private communication. One reason for this is the simplicity of text-based communication coupled with the flexibility and feature richness of modern applications operating on a standardized operating system. For instance, various application files can be attached or cut-n-pasted to e-mail, and bundled into data packets transmitted by the e-mail application. Furthermore, e-mail can quickly be disseminated to large numbers of individuals (e.g., individually or associated with a group-name), forwarded to more individuals, responded to, and so on, resulting in mass communication. A chain of e-mails, comprising an original or parent message and child or forwarded and/or replied to messages, can convey the history of a conversation between large numbers of individuals. Accordingly, e-mail serves as a basis for most newer technologies, often leading the way for newer electronic messaging innovations, well over twenty years after its' inception.